About us

Rucksack Readers® is an award-winning publisher and the only specialist in guidebooks for long-distance walkers in the UK, perhaps in the world. Jacquetta Megarry founded it in 2000 to create guidebooks in a rucksack-friendly format. On her first long-distance walk, the West Highland Way, she had found the traditional design of guidebook impractical, and began to devise a waterproof, lightweight, open-flat format with built-in mapping.

After summiting Mount Kilimanjaro, she put her idea into production and extended the range to include the Inca Trail and Great Wall of China in addition to routes in Ireland and the UK. Her experience on an Aconcagua expedition in 2003 led her to devise the Rucksack Pocket Summits format for climbers of the world’s continental summits. Four ascents of Kili (each by a different route) and other high-altitude trekking deepened her interest in preventing and managing altitude sickness. Rucksack Readers sponsored the Xtreme Everest project in which she was one of 200 volunteers who completed an exhaustive and exhausting battery of medical tests en route for Everest Base Camp at 5300 m (17,500 ft). You can listen here to Mark Stephen’s radio interview with Jacquetta (Out of Doors, 6 minutes) or read the online interview by Vulpes Libris in 2008. She was featured in the Independent Publishers Guild blog in 2017.

By 2019 there were 40 Rucksack Readers in print, many of them in revised editions, updated for route changes and options.Jacquetta works from her Edinburgh base with a dedicated core team spread across central Scotland: Ian Clydesdale (WorkHorse) for the design of books and pages, BCS Studio for website design and Booksource in Glasgow for UK distribution. The team of Rucksack Readers authors numbers about 20 and the support staff include a labrador Toby who is in training to become less of a liability.

Jacquetta welcomes contact with customers. Normally, she replies promptly to suggestions: if you have any ideas (about the books, the website or future titles) please Contact us. For more information about Rucksack Readers, please visit our Newsletter archive. Rucksack Readers® has been a Registered Trade Mark since 2009.